How Dallas-area Influencer Brittany Dawn Found Herself Staring Down Social Media's Double-edged Sword

Dallas-area fitness influencer Brittany Dawn rose from a self-described insecure college graduate to a social media celebrity with hundreds of thousands of followers.As she shared fitness and lifestyle tips that sculpted her into a professional bikini competitor, she turned her passion into a business — selling what she marketed as personalized diet and workout plans for as much as $300 each.Then, even faster than her rise to fame, the 27-year-old whose legal name is Brittany Davis found herself at the center of an epic backlash over what her followers described as years of unfulfilled promises.The very people she said she set out to help began accusing her of scamming them, and she ended up on ABC’s Good Morning America last week trying to explain to a national audience what went wrong.Her experience illustrates the double-edged world of social media, says Caitlin Mitchell, a social strategy director at The Richards Group, a Dallas advertising agency that works with hundreds of businesses looking to bolster their image on Instagram, YouTube and other popular social media platforms."Social media is both a blessing and a curse,” Mitchell said. “It's a blessing in that you can build and scale your business faster than ever, but you can also completely destroy and tarnish your brand faster."For Davis, that’s where she now finds herself — trying to restore her personal brand while making good with upset customers.  Continue reading...